My mother said 4 It is interesting you should put it like that.'
My father said 'Like what.'
My mother said '"Are you suggesting some flaw in my handling of the breeding — "' Then she broke off and said 'Oh never mind!'
My father said 'Oh we're now going to have your expertise about the hidden meaning behind the meaning of words, are we?'
My mother said 'Max asked you a question which you would not answer.' I did not think my mother was on the point of tears.
Watson had completed her performance at the sideboard. But we anyway ate the rest of the meal in silence.
I would think — Well, God protect me from inheriting any of the acquired characteristics of my father!
And — There is no reason, is there, why I should not be a mutation?
After such an evening my mother would come up to say goodnight to me in my room and she would lie back on the bed as if she were exhausted. She would say 'What a comfort you are to your old mother!'
On this occasion I wanted to say — But what do you really feel about Dr Kammerer? It is different from what you feel about my father?
But sometimes with my mother sprawled on my bed like this my mind went blank; it was as if we were somehow on hot sand; as if I were an insect that could be crawling on her.
I do not know if I make sense in my descriptions of my mother: she was this large blonde woman who was sometimes girlish and sometimes queenly; sometimes apparently a victim and often victorious. In relation to my father she often seemed to be all these things at once: she would sit with her legs curled underneath her and her eyes cast sadly down like a mermaid on a rock; then, as if glistening with spray, she would be a siren luring helpless sailors to their doom. In arguments with my father she would sometimes seem to yield to his heavier weight; then suddenly, with a ju-jitsu-like flick of her wrist, as it were, it was as if she had him flying over her head and into the shrubbery. Or more prosaically, he would be rushing out to his car to go to Cambridge. There are tricks like this that people can do who practise psychoanalysis: opponents can attack you; you can say 'Now it is interesting why you say that!' and there they are, in the air on their way into the shrubbery.
This evening when my mother was lying on her back in my room she looked at me with her eyes that even I could tell were somewhat wicked; and she said 'Shall we ask him again?'
I said 'Who?'
She said 'Dr Kammerer, of course.' Then — 'I know he liked you. Did you like him?'
I said 'Yes.'
I wanted to explain — It was somehow as if we all three, she and I and he, were agents in an occupied territory.
Sometimes when my mother came up to talk to me in my bedroom like this she would after a time start pulling her skirt up and say 'I must pee.'
This sort of thing between mother and son was, I suppose, unusual for the time: perhaps it came from ideas that arose out of psychoanalysis about the need for relationships between parents and children to be open. My mother would go next door to the bathroom and would expect me to go on chatting through the half-open door while she sat on the lavatory.
I said 'What did you think was so special about Dr Kammerer?'
She said 'He didn't show off. At least not to others.'
She sat with her legs apart: her arms hung down between her knees.
I said 'And that's a good thing?'
She said'Yes.'
I said 'Why?'
She said 'I think he was interested in getting on with what he wanted.'
She gave herself a wipe with some paper between her legs.
My mother's interest in psychoanalysis had begun, I suppose, when she had found herself on the edge of the Bloomsbury Group and, possessing like other women in the group considerable energy which she did not want to expend in social or domestic chores or on the taking of buns and tea to the poor of the village — but, unlike some women in the group, finding that she had no literary or artistic talent — she had turned to what seemed to be the latest intellectual challenge, which was psychoanalysis. And what more effective business indeed can be turned to by people who have creative energy but no artistic talent (you think I am having a dig at you? but I am having a dig at myself! you know how I admire psychoanalysis!) than this discipline which can make people feel, if they wish, that they are creative in a way even superior to those
who create artistically. For do not analysts feel that they can explain away the mechanisms of artistic creation? And how well, ju-jitsu-like, can they defend themselves against those who try to explain away the mechanisms of psychoanalysis! (And you know how I admire people who defend themselves without appearing to defend themselves.)
Anyway, psychoanalysis had begun to make an impact on Bloomsbury at this time: James Strachey, brother of Lytton, had gone to Vienna in 1919 to be analysed by Freud; Adrian Stephen, Virginia Woolf's brother, had become a practising analyst in London. My mother, when I had begun to go to school, had become a founder member of a group studying psychoanalysis in Cambridge. Now in 1923 and 1924 she was going up once a week to whatever lectures were being given in London.
I once said to her Tell me about these lectures.'
She said 'You want me to explain about psychoanalysis?'
I said'Yes.'
(I do not think even my mother could have had this conversation while she was sitting on the lavatory: she was probably sitting in the bow window of the drawing-room, with her legs pulled up underneath her like a mermaid.)
She said 'Psychoanalysis is to do with the idea that certain patterns are set in the mind, probably as a result of a person's experiences in early childhood. These experiences have been frightening; so a child protects himself by pushing his feelings into that part of the mind that is called the unconscious. There he need not think of them, but they go bad, like things rotting in a cellar. Psychoanalysis is the process of trying to bring them into the sun.'
I said 'I see.'
She said 'How funny to be talking to you like this!'
I wanted to say — What frightening experiences did I have in childhood?
I said 'And do they get better in the sun?'
She said 'Yes.' Then — 'Not always.' Then — 'I think so, if you are brave enough to let them.'
I said 'What sort of experiences did I have in early childhood?' I laughed.
I thought — Why am I laughing? Then — You mean, I am protecting myself?
— From whatever things are rotting away in my cellar? From my mother?
My mother seemed to think for a time. Then she said 'They are usually, yes, to do with your parents.'
You know those experiences we have always been interested in, you and I — those moments when what one is talking about seems to coincide with what is happening: it is then that it is as if there is a white light coming down; some performance on a stage is over, and an audience is getting up to leave the theatre. Well, this was the first time I remember being conscious of such an experience: there I was with my mother in the bow window of the drawing-room; the sun was at our backs; she had her legs underneath her like a siren; I was a sailor who had swum to the edge of her rock and was about to pull myself up out of the sea.
I said 4 Well, tell me.'
She said 'What do you want to know?'
I thought — How do I know if it is unconscious?
Then she said 'In fact, of course, it is only you who know. The analyst can only help you to remember.'
I said 'I see.' Then — 'How?'
She said 'He or she listens for what is behind your words; for what is still in the dark, and not in the sun.'
I said 'And can that be heard?'
After a time she said 'I think so. Can't it?'
I was thinking — There is, yes, this feeling of ants crawling over the earth, my mother.